The Old Republic's Daunting Voiceover Work

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Upcoming MMO script has more than forty novels worth of content.

By Jeff Haynes

BioWare and LucasArts created a huge buzz around Star Wars: The Old Republic with their trailer, which captured the imagination of Star Wars fans that wanted to experience life before the Great Galactic War. Apart from the gameplay and the variety in character classes, one of the most striking features of The Old Republic is the inclusion of voiced dialogue for player characters as well as all NPCs within the game. While a feat for most single-player games, this is an astronomical task for an MMO, and a recent developer blog post on The Old Republic website seems to have confirmed.

The script for The Old Republic, according to Shauna Perry, director of audio and localization for the game, will have more than forty novels worth of content. Additionally, the finished game will have more than one thousand four hour voice-over sessions worth of dialogue recorded from at least five different cities in the world; Los Angeles, London, New York, San Francisco and Toronto currently being listed as sites used to capture the work of the large voice actor cast, which numbers into the hundreds.

Perry initially mentioned that the voice over work was a joint project between the two companies, with BioWare writing scripts for each session and LucasArts responsible for recording sessions. Afterwards, LucasArts would sending the assets back to BioWare, who would incorporate these into the game. However, Perry mentioned that this was not like a standard recording project for any game; she mentioned that the size of the voiceover work within The Old Republic was "at least 10 KoToRs recorded back to back." Perry also provided insight into the entire process for the game, which involved a team of writers getting a script together for the voice actors. From there, the lead writer would have a script conference with the voice over directors to make sure that they could understand exactly how to direct the voice actors. After that, the voice actors would come in and record with a script that had both a synopsis of the scene as well as comments to add nuances to the performance.

Once the lines are recorded, both LucasArts and BioWare review each session to select which lines will be kept or re-recorded in later sessions. Perry mentioned that this clearly involved a ton of work, stating, "while the script calls for hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue, we will actually have recorded much more than that!" Once both teams from LucasArts and BioWare are satisfied with the performance, the work is included into the game. While Perry didn't mention where they happened to be within the whole voice over process, it would appear that both LucasArts and BioWare have been working on this for quite some time.